From the Theopolis Course: Architecture and Liturgical Space - Our secular culture and the church both engage in liturgical practices – rituals of ultimate concerns. These practices shape our loves, form our identities, and seek to displace other interests. Their liturgies are often opposed, as they propose different visions of “the good.” While advanced western culture uses every means to instill a desacralized vision, many churches have abandoned liturgical practices and resist cultural engagement.

Architecture serves a liturgical role. As embodied creatures we need more than shelter, we need architecture. A work of architecture is a carefully designed liturgical environment, supporting our civic, work, family, play and worship life. It conveys, through spatial form and ordering, and various aesthetic and symbolic languages, who we are: our dignity or meaninglessness, our abandonment or legitimate sense of place in the cosmos, our status as faceless atomized individuals or as members of a connected loving community, and the nature and purpose of our civic life, work, politics and worship, as we live with each other, in Beauty or darkness before the Trinity.

In this course, Daniel Lee explores the nature of architecture and how the liturgies of both secular culture and the church have worked, both past and present. In this context he focuses in on liturgical practices for the church today. He completes the course by presenting a process that church leaders may use for pre-planning significant new places of worship today.

This Easter Intensive Course was held in March of 2017, and was taught by Daniel Lee, James B. Jordan and Peter Leithart.

Peter Leithart received an A.B. in English and History from Hillsdale College in 1981, and a Master of Arts in Religion and a Master of Theology from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1986 and 1987. In 1998 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in England. He has served in two pastorates: He was pastor of Reformed Heritage Presbyterian Church (now Trinity Presbyterian... read more